In a post yesterday morning, I reported that Republicans were gearing up to hit back hard against Obama's baseless "outsourcing" meme, and that Romney surrogates were preparing to step up their aggression level. That reporting was quickly confirmed in one irresistibly tasty television appearance. Behold, former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu taking a shell-shocked Andrea Mitchell to school and back in just over three minutes:

The obvious highlight here is Sununu openly laughing at Mitchell as she hopelessly gropes for something -- anything -- to come to The One's defense. "You're struggling, Andrea. You're struggling." Priceless. Keep in mind that this show is entitled "Andrea Mitchell Reports." She's supposed to be one of the remaining actual journalists over there, unlike the network's cavalcade of openly Lefty polemicists in primetime. Ah well. Mitchell stutters and stammers through the segment, tossing out meaningless buzzwords like "private equity," seemingly in an attempt to reassure herself that this really is worse for Romney than it is for the White House -- just because. My suspicion is that she was prepared for Sununu to come on and dispute Obama's outsourcing lies by citing fact-checkers, and stop at that. She even half-conceded those points, even though she later expressed shock when Sununu asserted that Romney was responsible for zero outsourcing...which is precisely what the fact-check organizations found. But she was clearly caught totally flat-footed by the GOP's coordinated return fire, reeling as Sununu ran down a list of specific instances of Obama stimulus-related outsourcing. Maybe she should have read the Tipsheet before starting her show. This performance, coupled with her disgraceful selective editing incident last month, totally drains any remaining reservoir of credibility she may have accumulated. Nah, who am I kidding? Who could forget this pitiful "report" she filed for NBC Nightly News during the height of the "War on Women" faux ordeal. She's a partisan operative.